Missionary family adds quintuplets — born in Dallas — to the mix

All Carrie and Gavin Jones had hoped for was a second child. But in the course of five minutes, the missionary workers became the proud and rare parents of not one, not two, not three, not four, but — h-e-l-l-o — five newborn babies.

“I’m still trying to get my head around it,” a relaxed-looking Carrie Jones, 34, said Monday.

The quintuplets, who were delivered Thursday morning, are among the first sets born in the U.S. this year and the first ever at St. Paul University Hospital, part of UT Southwestern Medical Center.

Only about a dozen sets of quintuplets are born in the U.S. each year, said Dr. Gary Burgess, medical director of St. Paul’s neonatal intensive care unit.

“It’s my first set of quintuplets, and I’ve been doing this for 27 years,” said Burgess, who’s overseeing care for the Jones children.

Mom and Dad are fine, although Gavin Jones conceded they’re “going to need a lot of help” tending to the newborns.

“We can’t do it alone,” said Jones, a helicopter pilot and missionary for Florida-based Wycliffe Bible Translators, where his wife is employed as a public health worker.

The infants — Will Edward, David Stephen, Marcie Jane, Seth Jared and Grace Elise — all are in stable condition at the hospital, where they will remain for the next several months until they are healthy enough to go home, Burgess said.

They weighed from 1 pound, 12 ounces to 2 pounds, 11 ounces at birth. Such weights are common for premature babies, and the Jones quintuplets were delivered after a gestation period of 27 weeks and 5 days.

“The five babies are doing quite well right now,” Burgess said.

When Carrie Jones found out in March that the fertility shots she took to help her conceive another child would result in multiple births, she admittedly was shocked.

“I was not happy about it the first two weeks,” she said at a news conference, the family’s first public appearance since the babies were born.

But later, she said, she came to accept it as a blessing — a message that the couple’s 8-year-old son, Isaac, amplified.

From there, he joked, the relationship was destined to blossom. A couple of years later, however, when Gavin and his family moved to California, they drifted apart and basically forgot about each other.

But after Gavin was diagnosed with leukemia a few years later, word got back to the school in Colombia.

“I can still remember seeing his name written on the upper-left-hand corner of the blackboard as a reminder to pray for his recovery,” Carrie recalled.

With his cancer in remission, Gavin finished high school and enrolled in flight school at LeTourneau University in Longview, east of Dallas.

Carrie, whose family had moved to the Dallas area when she was 16, was studying biology at Dallas Baptist University.

In 1998, Gavin joined some friends in town to see Carrie and, just like that, the two connected again. They got married the next year after graduating from college.

Within five years, Isaac was born. And in 2004, the family moved to Papua New Guinea, a remote island in the South Pacific. They only returned to the U.S. a couple of times on furloughs, they said.

On a 2007 vacation trip to Colorado, Carrie got very sick. “I thought it was a bad case of food poisoning,” she said.

Instead, she had ruptured a fallopian tube. “And I nearly died,” she said. “They said if I was 20 minutes later, I probably would’ve died.”

After that, she said, she and her husband had not been able to conceive another child. So when she returned to the U.S. this year, she began taking fertility shots to help her get pregnant.

On March 9, while seeing a doctor in North Carolina, she found out she was carrying more than one baby.

“And my brain just shut down,” she said. “At that point, I was just praying that one of them would have a heartbeat.”

A team of more than 50 UT Southwestern specialists, nurses, technicians and therapists helped give her and her husband peace of mind.

“This has been an amazing experience,” said Gavin Jones.

The couple has been keeping their friends and family updated on their blog — gavincarrie.blogspot.com — where they’ve posted pictures and occasionally emotional insights.

Diane Wipfler, board chairwoman of Mothers of Supertwins, a national nonprofit provider of support, education and research on higher-order multiple births, said advances in medical science have helped reduce the number of quadruplets and quintuplets in recent years.

“There’s not that many,” Wipfler said, “which certainly is good, because there are risks with multiple births.”

IN THE KNOW: Odds of multiples

The odds in the U.S. of having multiple births without the use of any medical intervention:

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